Open-source Wowza alternatives

SRS, short for Simple Realtime Server, is an open-source real-time media server for live streaming and video communication. It handles many protocols in one product, among them RTMP, WebRTC, HLS, SRT, HTTP-FLV, MPEG-DASH and the GB28181 surveillance standard, and supports video codecs including H.264, H.265, AV1 and VP9 and audio codecs including AAC, Opus and G.711.

It runs on Linux and macOS across a wide range of processor architectures, from x86-64 and ARM variants to Apple M1, RISC-V, LoongArch and MIPS. The getting-started guide recommends running SRS in Docker, after which you open the local web console on port 8080 and push a stream with FFmpeg or OBS to an RTMP address, then play it back with common players using whichever protocol you prefer. A mirror registry is mentioned for users in China.

SRS is written in C++ and licensed under MIT, though some third-party libraries carry their own licenses. Topics point to low-latency streaming, live broadcasting and video conferencing. It suits teams building live video platforms, surveillance ingest or conferencing backends who want to run their own media server.

MediaMTX is a live media server and media proxy that publishes, reads, proxies, records and plays back real-time video and audio streams. It acts as a media router, taking a stream from one end and delivering it to the other, with an emphasis on efficiency and portability.

Streams can be published over Media-over-QUIC, SRT, WebRTC, RTSP, RTMP, HLS, MPEG-TS or RTP using tools like FFmpeg, GStreamer or OBS Studio, and they are converted automatically between protocols so viewers can read them in a different format. Several streams can run at once on separate paths, and recordings can be written to disk in fMP4 or MPEG-TS and played back later.

Operational features include hot configuration reloading, internal, HTTP or JWT authentication, a control API, Prometheus-compatible metrics, and hooks that run external commands when clients connect or publish. The Go program ships as a single executable for Linux, Windows and macOS and is released under the MIT license, so it can be self-hosted anywhere a binary runs.

Ant Media Server is a scalable media server for low-latency live streaming. It supports WebRTC with a claimed latency of about half a second, along with SRT, RTMP, RTSP, HLS and CMAF low-latency HLS, and also handles H.265/HEVC. Developers use it to build real-time video applications and live broadcasting.

Capabilities include adaptive bitrate workflows, transcoding, recording and cloud auto-scaling. SDKs are provided for iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter, Unity and JavaScript, and security features include SSL/TLS, token authentication, IP filtering and watermarking. The README lists use cases such as telehealth, e-learning, sports streaming, auctions and interactive applications.

The project is split into a Community edition with the essentials and an Enterprise edition that adds advanced features and support, and a free trial of the Enterprise edition is offered. It is written in Java, and documentation covers installation, API references and tutorials.

OvenMediaEngine, or OME, is a streaming server built for live video with sub-second latency. It can deliver high-definition streams to very large audiences using Low Latency HLS and WebRTC. The project also lists a hosted demo service, OvenSpace, built with OvenMediaEngine, OvenPlayer and OvenLiveKit, with its source available for implementation examples.

On the input side, OME accepts pushed streams over WebRTC, WHIP, SRT, RTMP, Enhanced RTMP and MPEG-2 TS over UDP, and it can pull streams over RTSP and OVT. An embedded live transcoder produces adaptive bitrate renditions with codecs including VP8, H.264, AV1 and, with hardware, H.265. Viewers receive output over LLHLS and WebRTC, and legacy HLS and SRT output are also supported.

Further capabilities include scheduled channels for pre-recorded live programming, multiplex channels, DVR-style live rewind, dumping streams for video on demand, timed ID3v2 metadata, WebVTT subtitles and DRM with Widevine, FairPlay and PlayReady. An embedded TURN server and WebSocket signalling server support WebRTC. It is written in C++ and licensed under AGPL-3.0.